Best oracle server platform

We have right now an IBM H50 which is a 32-bit machine with 5 oracle (8.1.7.4)databases with 5 different applications running on it. The problem is that some of these applications must move to oracle 9, which requires a 64-bit machine.
My question is can or have we to move to an other AIX box , or can we move over to an Intel box. I want an advice about this taking in consideration different aspects like security, availability,performance etc etc.
Thanks in advance.

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You don't have to move to any HW or SW platform. Either Intel or
PowerPC platforms run Oracle9 at very good performance. Both of
them uses the new technologies of Virtualization and Processor
Chip's Micropartitioning/Multithreading and using AIX/linux you
will get best performance.

One consideration i'd use in this case is that you already know
your enviroment and your OS (AIX in this case) so you have to
evaluate the learning curve and impact of implementing a new
technology in a production system.

What AIX version are you using in your H50 server? If using AIX
4.3 you can install 64bits emulation and run your Oracle DB
64bits. Consult your Oracle support for this option.

My point of view is that PowerPCs are very good processors, and
next year IBM will release the new Power6 with very high MHz
speeds. AIX is one of the best UNIX's today with a good LVM
(Logical Volume Manager) you don't have to pay for (like old
Solaris versions), as well as micropartitions and
multithreading; easy administration throught the use of smitty
utility and a very fine community of systems administrators
willing to share their knowledge.

High Availability is achieved by configuring redundancy at
various levels of HW (redundant powers, use of Etherchannel, use
of MPIO of another SW of Fiber Channel Multipathing) and SW
(LVM, Dead gateway detection).

Some friends of mine said that Oracle runs ok on Solaris but i've
seen very intensive Oracle applications running on AIX without
problems, of course, some good tuning techniques are required.

Mario via ibm-aix-l wrote:
>
>
> Hi everyone who can help me, in taking the most right decision.
>
> We have right now an IBM H50 which is a 32-bit machine with 5 oracle (8.1.7.4)databases with 5 different applications running on it. The problem is that some of these applications must move to oracle 9, which requires a 64-bit machine.
> My question is can or have we to move to an other AIX box , or can we move over to an Intel box. I want an advice about this taking in consideration different aspects like security, availability,performance etc etc.
> Thanks in advance.

Oracle 9 doesn't require 64-bit. We have it running on plenty of 32-bit
machines. Oracle 10 will require a 64-bit platform on SystemP

I have H50, H70, and IBM P650 servers. When moving to Oracle 9i or 10g
I got some H70 machines for a little over $2,000 each. That held us
over until we purchased our IBM P650 servers. They are great, but too
expensive. We have been moving to Dell 2850 and 6850 servers (2cpu,
4cpu) and running RedHat Linux Enterprise Server 4. So far we have been
using RedHat linux for 6 months (before that we used SuSE Linux) without
any problems. Our up time is close to the same as with the IBM P650s.
The reason it is not the same is because of the learning curve on Linux.
With our configuration we are seeing better performance on the Intel
based Linux boxes. That is partly because the P650's have 1.45 ghz
cpu's and the Intel's are 3 ghz+.

The other huge advantage you have with Linux is Oracle patches. Oracle
is developed on Linux (from what I've been told) so those patches come
quickly. AIX is ALWAYS last to have the patches available. For
example, the Oracle 10.2.0.2 patch was available for Linux in Feb 2006.
AIX wasn't available until Aug 2006.

We are going Intel based Linux and will be off IBM completely by end of
2007.

first of all let me say that could be really nice if you migrate to oracl
e 10g
instead of 9i, it takes less time and it prevent any problem for the next

future. We are in the middle of a similar migration and I must admit that
10g
gave us the possibility to save some days of work, anyway it is compatibl
e
most of the times and you are able to open bugs if you have problems.
It is also really stable and tested now, so it is a mature product.

About moving to AIX or to Intel Box it is your choice, what I need to kno
w is
if these applications are mission critical or not.
One of my customers have an H50 and it is still using it after 5 years, n
o
problem, one reboot in the last years just for maintenance.
Are you sure you can do the same with a Linux Box? Probably in terms of
hardware you spend the same, but we prefer to have AIX for Mission Critic
al
and Linux/Windows for the rest.
In the specific case availability (with HACMP) is not comparable, I don't

think you will nevere be able to have a similar product on Intel (on Spar
c
probably a SunCluster can be compared....).
Security if you consider a Linux and an AIX is more stable on AIX, you ha
ve
few maintenance levels, on Windows and Linux (RH for example) you have da
ily
updates and it is not nice when you install a patch daily and you must ch
eck
also if all the services are up and running.
Performances.... Depence in you configuration, there is no valid comparis
on,
some operations are faster on Intel but generally speaking the RISC give

You are right, Oracle is developed on Linux and ported to other platforms
at
the moment (generally Windows in the Oracle plans), in the past it was on

Solaris, then moved to the other platforms...
For Oracle patches it takes less time, but also patches are really differ
ent
from AIX and Linux, while the Linux is developed in Redwood part of the t
ests
for AIX must be moved to Montpellier in France...

Let me say that performances on Linux with last machines are better compa
red
to p650, but on p570 performances are better. Then could be nice also to
understand the rest of the environment, Storage play a big role and
configuration and drivers are really different between the two platforms.

You must also take in consideration this.

Anyway my test machine is under Linux :-) But it was cost related, to cre
ate a
test env for Oracle under AIX means to spend X0.000 Euros....

the best server for oracle is solaris 10 or linux running on an
x4600 by sun. the speed on the dual cores (you can have up to
16 cores, but sun is coming out with quad cores which will plug
into this hardware, so you can have up to 32 cores -- we are
benchmarking with 4 cores) is magnitude faster and leaves our
very expensive AIX boxes in the dust. not only is the x4600
(x86) extremely fast, but oracle cuts a deal on the licensing of
the processors -- i think it is 50%, so instead of paying for
each core, you pay for a single processor. one caveat, using
solaris 10 pretty much forces you to use oracle 10g -- 9i was
never officially ported to solaris 10 x86 (although i have heard
that some people were running it any way).

we are currently on aix and the benchmarking we are doing on the
x86 is the difference between night and day. for the money and
the speed, it is a tremendously good buy and there is nothing
currently in the IBM inventory that can match the speed of the
AMD opteron chips in the x86 box.

we run oracle with partitioning (also 50% off normal non-x86
list) and our database is currently 3.3Tb with 2.6 of that in 1
9-way partitioned table and its associated 9, also partitioned 9
ways, indexes.

we will be moving to the x86 for production in the 4th quarter
and i can hardly wait. the large table has 4.3 billion rows and
we have 2-3 batch jobs running each day inserting about 500
million or more rows daily. all i can say is that the
processing time that we've seen in the sun box is so much
better.

if price/performance is what you are looking for, you really
should have a serious look at the x86 line. even if price isn't
a major consideration, the performance is just so much better
than anything we've gotten from IBM equipment.

while i have used aix extensively on and off since v3.2, i much
prefer solaris. it is just a more robust o/s... there are so
many shortcomings in aix. <sigh> like i said, i will be SO
happy when the move is
completed.

then again, ymmv. best bet if you consider this route is to have
sun come in (there's try and buy or other ways) with a server
and just benchmark it for your app.

oh, i should point out that moving to such a platform will
necessitate changing your DB since the "endian-ness" will be
different. if you are already at 10g, oracle provides tools
thru RMAN and transportable tablespaces to help make the move.
we are actually still benchmarking the move process (AGAIN) and
it looks like we will dump to flat files the small 800G stuff
and sql load them into the new instance (our experience shows
that to be faster than exp/imp)and do a sql copy of the big
table -- but we were brainstorming new ideas, so that is subject
to change -- more benchmarking. it took forever to build the
first database but it wasn't important for speed of data xfer,
just needed to have the database to benchmark the application.
don't know how big your database is, but it might be
considering.

last thing. the storage array we are using is the IBM shark, we
got better performance initially with the sun/storage-tek 6140,
but it got shot down for political reasons. they were going to
put us on the whale, but our app doesn't play well with others
and we ended up on our own storage and not in a frame with other
apps here.
we are using veritas to do the clustering and filesystem
management. going fully sun would have been less expensive but
it got shot down by the architecture team -- but hey, at least
we are getting off the slow aix server :)

(and no i do not work for sun nor any of its affiliates -- this
is my personal experience and opinion here, again ymmv.)

I have tested Solaris 10 on x86 platforms (IBM ones) and
installed Oracle 10 with success, despite my enviroment is just
experimental with no such tables as yours has, i have found many
improvements in Solaris 10. One of the things i like much is the
zpool concept that is far away better than LVM in AIX (and
better than Veritas, which by the way is sometimes a little more
complicated than IBM LVM).

Again, Oracle is a SW DB that traditionaly runs on Sun/Solaris
Servers and raw devices so some benefits can be expected.

Well, we have a company that works with the Italian Stock exchange. They
have 10g on Solaris 10.... It is more or less perfect and the downtime is
less then 1%... It is impressive, before they had a machine I personally
installed. Uptime before we migrate was 4 years with Oracle 8i.....

Could be interesting to test the ASM on Oracle 10g on raw devices (the lv
withous file system).